The First Signs of Trouble

Trouble began in the form of an extremely stressful work environment that had been created by the Manager of Financial Services at the University I worked at. They had suddenly put my trainer in Payroll and Personnel and my Accounting Manager (who had hired me two months earlier) on paid leave pending an overtime “scandal.” They thought that another employee in another department had been having my trainer falsify her time sheets to make it appear she had worked hours she had not.

Well, needless to say, these employees were there one minute and gone the next. This left me on my own to learn their Payroll procedures, develop my own, and figure out the complex process of Personnel. Add to this a narcissistic and micromanaging Manager, and work became very tense. I had only been there maybe three months, and already this drama was happening. I thought I had left that behind at my last position. Apparently not. They appointed our senior accountant as acting Accounting Manager because he had the most seniority. Now, if the powers that were had only left him alone to manage the department, everything might have been okay for us. But, they didn’t trust him to run the department, and that was a huge mistake on their part. He was more than qualified.

Anyway, the situation began to stretch out into the summer and the fall. By the fall, I was becoming a basket case. I was drinking after work to try to relieve the stress, but like everything else, I do not drink half-assed. I do everything to the extreme (or I used to). So, my drinking began to go out of control as the stress increased in the office. The Manager of Accounting was constantly in the office, and like I said she had some problems with narcissism. Everyone around her had to make her look good because in reality, she was not all that good at what she did. Although none of us knew exactly what she did, we all knew she wasn’t good at her job and relied on her subordinates to make her look good.

Well, at some point, I started to feel really depressed. And I mean, depressed like I had not been since High School and that had been about 15 years with no symptoms. Yes, I started my mental illness career with uni-polar depression for the majority of my life. It wasn’t until I was about 32 that i was officially diagnosed, first with BiPolar II, and then BiPolar I with psychotic features. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Psychotic features. What the hell did that mean? So, anyway, I go into a deep funk and go on a drinking binge for about a week and a half. Obviously, I am not going to work, so I am putting even more pressure on an already stressed out office. That wasn’t very cool of me, but I wasn’t really thinking about that at the time, just that I had to escape for a while.

Well, needless to say, my superior, The Manager from Hell was not amused with my 10 day absence, so I was required to call in directly to her or to my “other boss” when I was going to be out. Well, one thing about the first episode of BiPolar disorder leaves you avoiding people, so calling in and talking to someone was impossible for me, and I did not adhere to that part of my “return to work” conditions. In the meantime, during all of this I made an extremely good friend in another department, and if it weren’t for him, I would have imploded long before I did.

I knew I was having problems due to the experience that I had in High School so I looked up a few therapists in my provider directory and emailed the list to my Doctor, and asked for a recommendation. He recommended my current therapist as someone he had worked with, and whom he felt would be a good fit with me. I may look fairly conservative, but I am actually quite eccentric. The conservative thing is a disguise 🙂 Anyway, I made an appointment with her, and went to see her. I told her everything about me from the HS depression to the attack I experienced at 16 years of age. She was just one of those people you could really open up to. So, I began seeing her, and received the dubious distinction of being diagnosed as uni-polarly depressed which is what I thought it was. I didn’t feel any extremes of emotion, I did have problems sleeping but I had always had problems with that.

During the course of the first few months of therapy as I gradually began to open up, I discussed the various activities that my friend, now lover, had been engaging in. Apparently, BiPolar’s are risk takers without thinking about the consequences of their actions. Well, my friend and I had taken to having sex in public places around campus where the risk of being caught was quite high. Apparently, this is a symptom of BiPolar depression. I did not know that at the time. So, as I talked and she listened, I began to reveal myself as a BiPolar Type II which is BiPolar, but not really full blown BiPolar Disorder. The more I talked, and the more she listened and had me take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, I became a BiPolar Type I with psychotic features. I was progressing up the diagnosis ladder. Hooray for me. This information hit me like a Mack truck. I was floored. Was I really this sick? Apparently so. The doctor said so.

I continued to have problems at work. The only bright spot for me was my buddy/lover in the other department. Otherwise, I would have rather stayed home drinking. I was finally suspended for failure to follow the call-in stipulation, but I just could not talk to a live person sometimes. I kept my diagnosis to myself. Eventually, the untreated Disorder became too much to handle, and after another series of absences, i was given a Letter of Intent to Terminate. There is a whole involved story surrounding this, but let’s just say it is really hard to just fire someone from a University. The process takes about two to three months or longer if you can afford an attorney. So, there it was. I had been hit with the Mack truck of mood disorder diagnoses. and I was being fired. Life was good, not so much.

I was untreated meaning not medicated, so I was still self medicating with alcohol and other substances as available. The next installment will include the initial attempts at stabilizing me. I am what they call “treatment resistant,” meaning I am very sensitive to the medications that are commonly used to stabilize a BiPolar person. Oh, and I did get fired. That helped. A lot.